Samsung has a strong foothold in smart phone market and it is gaining in its share of tablets. In my opinion such rare quarterly slumps are not really reckonable. It is just a matter of time when giant like Samsung comes up again with some more innovative and powerful device which would make such slump forgotten soon.

@ Thomas Claburn, I don't think so. Such legal entanglements are part of every big corporation's big monies. Though I could never understand how, yet I guess that such legal battles must be somehow paying them off in one way or the other. Apart from legal entanglements, counter advertising like Microsoft's Scroogled campaign is another similar thing.

Samsung hasn't released any sales numbers of its smartphones or tablets, ever. The best they did was to give shipped numbers. But that stopped way back in the first calendar year quarter of 2011, when Lenovo called out their shipped numbers of tablets to the USA as bogus, and stated that of the 1.5 million Samsung claimed, they had only sold 20,000. Samsung refused to give information about that, but stated that they would no longer give out shipped numbers for their tablets and smartphones in their quarterly reports. Similar things have happened since then early during the trial between Samsung and Apple, both were required to supply actual sales numbers of tablets and phones in dispute. It was found that Samsung had sold between one third and one half the number of phones under dispute that companies such as Gartner and IDC had guessed at, and of the one million tablets guessed at having shipped to the USA during that time, only about 50,000 were sold.
So when I read numbers of smartphones and tablets Samsung is guessed to have shipped, or sold, I can only shake my head at it. Nobody knows how many Samsung sells. They aren't even close in their estimates, going by real numbers that we do know of. Yet, the same companies continue to make these big number guesses, without any numbers from Samsung to calibrate their work for the future. When Samsung released those numbers for the trial, no company revised their numbers at all. One would think that they would have understood that their guesses were way off, and revised their methods for the future, but no. Samsung's numbers are likely still well below those we read about.
It's sad.

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